Almost four years ago, GNOME The TWIG (This Week In GNOME) initiative began. Speaking of weekly updates, it's managed to expand and attract developers, so we could say that the project and the desktop in general have grown thanks to this initiative. This week's release marks the 200th, and the TWIG community now has 259 members. To celebrate, they've released TWIG 2.0, which is basically improvements to their website.
For everything else, things continue as before: every Friday they publish a list with news that there has been every week, and the one from the 16th is the one you have below.
This week in GNOME
- Mutter, the GNOME compositor framework upon which GNOME Shell is built, has a new developer tool this week, the Mutter Development Kit. This new development kit provides a new way to run a nested instance of GNOME Shell within a GTK application that will provide several useful tools for compositor and shell development. The only tool it has so far is touch emulation, but more are coming.
- Labels like street names and house numbers can now be clicked to display location information (and easily add it to favorites) in Maps.
- Binary 5.3 has just been released as a minor update. It comes with many translation updates and some minor upgrades.
- Newsflash 4.0 is entering beta, which can be checked out on the flathub beta channel. In this release, most of the user interface code has been refactored to take advantage of all the Gtk and rust binding improvements added over the years. Image, audio, and video attachments now appear more prominently.
- Déjà Dup Backups has just received two major changes, which will be released in version 49.0: A UI update to better align with the HIG; Restic is now the default backend for all builds (not just the flathub build).
- Cube Time version 0.1.3 is released. Cube Timer is a tool for timing your Rubik's Cube solves. It tracks the time spent solving and maintains averages for previous solutions. Solutions can also be organized into different practice sessions. It also has a basic solution generator. Cube Timer's design was inspired by cstimer.net.
- Nautilus Compare, the context menu diff extension for the Nautilus file manager (also known as GNOME Files), is back in the Debian repositories after a five-year hiatus. Although it was updated for Python 3 and GTK 3 back in 2020, the extension, which uses the Meld diff and merge tool by default and offers localizations for 14 languages, was only uploaded and approved a week ago, following months of intensified user demand and with support for the newer GTK 4 and Nautilus 43. The extension is still available for older versions of Debian-family distributions in the Launchpad PPA, but can be conveniently installed from the default repositories in current development and planned official releases.
- Newelle, the AI assistant for Gnome, has been updated to 0.9.6, introducing selective profiling and reasoning support for the OpenRouter provider.
- Parabolic V2025.5.2 is here:
- Added the ability to pause/resume running downloads.
- Added the ability to specify storage folder paths in a batch file.
- The ability to exclude a download from history has been added to the advanced download options.
- Added Preferred Audio Codec option to Download Preferences.
- Audio codec information has been added to audio formats.
- An estimated time of arrival has been added to the download progress.
- Fixed an issue where generic videos were not downloading correctly.
And this has been all this week in GNOME.
Images and content: TWIG.